Blog: Language support, linked meshes

Nate

http://esotericsoftware.com/blog/Language-support-linked-meshes

BTW, can anyone who has Chinese, Croatian, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, or Russian as their OS language please confirm that Spine defaults to that language? I just want to make sure it works out there in the wild. 🙂

BinaryCats

谢谢 , hvala ti, Je vous remercie, ありがとうございました, 고맙습니다, gracias, Спасибо. But im a little disappointed

I didn't make it into the showcase

forum url linkey thing is broken, or I am, one of the two

and fmsjdkgnibrf omg mesh linking

Pharan

Nate, bug report:
LinkedMesh caused BinaryCats to crash.

Nate

I think it's a bug with BinaryCats. We can't possibly officially support BinaryCats here, try posting over on the BinaryCats forum. 😉

BinaryCats

:talk: :makeup: :drunk: :drunk: :tmi: :time: :beer: :rofl:

chrismweb

Nate, I was just curious which character sets you used for Japanese, and plan to use for Korean?

Did you just do everything with the fonts the standard way for LibGDX(using Hiero to save out the characters you needed, ect), or did you have to do anything special?

Haven't found a lot of information on localization in LibGDX, and Asian character sets seem to be overwhelming XD (although Thai had a low number of characters, so was able to do that a long time ago 😃)

Nate

Sorry for the delay.

First I rewrote the libgdx font layout stuff, see the GlyphLayout class and this blog post. I also wrote on the fly font rendering for libgdx using FreeType, so Spine actually renders glyphs to a backing texture on the fly, as needed. See FreeTypeFontGenerator for that.

Thai uses ligatures, which is where multiple glyphs are combined. This requires understanding special rules specified in the font and is not simple. Other languages like Hindi do this and RTL languages like Arabic are also complex, especially considering numbers and Latin text are laid out LTR while everything else is RTL. We have Arabic on the website, but not in the app:
https://ar.esotericsoftware.com/spine-purchase
Some day it would be nice to expose a library like HarfBuzz to handle these more complex languages in Spine.

zm4341

Wow~!

cdannoville

Hi guys!

Thanks for this big update 🙂

But, I'm not sure to realy understand how work the "linked mesh" and what advantage can it made... Sorry, maybe I've miss something?

Nate

We've added a section to the documentation for linked meshes:
http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-meshes#Linked-meshes

chrismweb

Nate wrote
Sorry for the delay...

No problem, even a delayed response helps a lot!

I appreciate the suggestions/ help/ feedback from what you've found. Text/fonts is one of the more frustrating parts of using LibGDX, and localization on top of that makes it even less fun XD

Thanks again!

kxs

When C-runtime supporting linked meshes will be available?

Nate

spine-c supports linked meshes (introduced in v3.1). It doesn't yet support shear (introduced in v3.2).
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/tree/master/spine-c#spine-version

mayhemking

Would it be possible to have multiple images nested under a single mesh? I'd like to have separate layers for shading, lineart and color so I can do palette swaps.

Nate

You can't currently have both a mesh and linked meshes visible at the same time. Some details here:
... how does mesh link work

Erika

mayhemking wrote
Would it be possible to have multiple images nested under a single mesh? I'd like to have separate layers for shading, lineart and color so I can do palette swaps.

OMG and I thought I was the only one!😃 I'd love to see how you manage it when you will be done!
Maybe such feature would be useful after all >.> :think: